A former teacher, who, I hasten to point out, I respect and admire greatly, once asked me in a lesson to “spin the air.”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he meant.

I tried a few things that I thought maybe the teacher had in mind, but none of them was right. I asked for clarification.

He said, “It’s like this,” and he blew a puff of air while twirling his finger around (presumably to indicate spinning).

Surely he didn’t mean literally to cause the air, somehow, to leave my lips in some kind of spiral. I confessed my confusion and asked if he would be kind enough to demonstrate spinning the air versus not spinning the air. He obliged.

I couldn’t detect any difference.

I still don’t know what he meant that day. In his mind, “spinning the air” was a perfectly good explanation of the concept, but it didn’t click for me.

Sometimes I ask my own students to do things that are obviously impossible, like “breathe all the way down into your toes.” It’s a useful fiction, but only because my students usually get the picture and can act it out physically. Requests that are less obviously fictional work as well or better (“blow the air so it goes all the way through the instrument and shoots out the other end”).

Explaining pedagogical concepts in fictional terms works if the fiction is understood in the same terms by both teacher and student, and can be a convenient shorthand for quickly evoking complex behaviors. But if the student doesn’t get it, it falls back on the teacher to know what is really desired (like more breath support, or a smaller amount of tongue touching the reed, or whatever) and to find a new explanation.